


Sandglass

by dewinter



Category: Shawshank Redemption - All Media Types
Genre: Future Fic, Gen, Post-Canon, Red/Andy if you like, Terminal Illnesses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:40:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28131795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dewinter/pseuds/dewinter
Summary: The more you think about time, the more it feels like just another lie.How to spend time at the edge of the world.
Relationships: Andy Dufresne & Ellis Boyd "Red" Redding
Comments: 9
Kudos: 22
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Sandglass

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ponderosa (ponderosa121)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ponderosa121/gifts).



What makes hope such an intense pleasure is the fact that the future, which we dispose of to our liking, appears to us at the same time under a multitude of forms, equally attractive and equally possible. 

Henri Bergson, _Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness_ (1889, tr. F L Pogson, 1910), 10.

Fellow man! Your whole life, like a sandglass, will always be reversed and will ever run out again, – a long minute of time will elapse until all those conditions out of which you were evolved return in the wheel of the cosmic process. And then you will find every pain and every pleasure, every friend and every enemy, every hope and every error, every blade of grass and every ray of sunshine once more, and the whole fabric of things which make up your life. This ring in which you are but a grain will glitter afresh forever.

Friedrich Nietzsche, “Eternal Recurrence,” in _The Antichrist: Notes to Zarathustra, and Eternal Recurrence_ (tr. Anthony Ludovici, 1911), 149.

I thought I knew all the ways time could pass.

You count the days, at first. The way a child might, coming on Christmas. Maybe you gouge it into the concrete – that cheap, crumbling WPA stuff. Maybe you hold the numbers in your head until they fall straight back out.

“What they give you?” old Buck Gordon asked me, squinting, on my fourth day, and I told him life, and he said, “don’t bother countin’, sonny, it don’t make it go faster.” I was pig headed in those days – no small part of what put me inside – so I ignored him, and counted. I got three months in – chipping paint off my bunk in neat rows – before I figured he was right.

What was there to count, anyway? We’ve made up all these ways to parcel up our lives. Minutes, hours, days, weeks, years. I guess they’re tied to the moon, or to the way the world turns – whatever it is, the more you think about it, the less it makes sense. How one minute can pass before your heart’s had time to beat, and then the next minute feels like it’s never going to end. I swear we were up on that roof, the sun on the backs of our necks, our numb fingers wrapped round those icy beers, no more than five minutes. That’s what it felt like. And the night Andy broke out of Shawshank – you could have stuffed decades into that night. That’s what I mean. The more you think about time, the more it feels like just another lie.

They sure give you ways to count it, though. Parole boards, new wardens, guys who leave, in boxes mostly. Time drags – maybe that’s why they used to chain guys like us to heavy iron balls, so we could feel the time dragging. I guess Andy counted it in handfuls of crushed up concrete, carried out in his pockets and scuffed nonchalantly into the yard. I was too busy counting my own time to notice what he was doing.

It’s different here. Time, and what it means.

I saw an etching in a book once. Or maybe it was a magazine. Delivery day from the library committee, Andy’d come sauntering over to the shop and say, could he borrow a few lads to help sort the donations, and there wasn’t a damn thing the screws could say to stop him, and we’d spend the rest of the day drawing the job out as long as we could, Heywood and Floyd and the rest, prising open the crates and giving ourselves papercuts on Frank Yerby, leafing through old copies of _Amazing Stories._

It might have been in a _National Geographic_ I saw it, or _Life._ This goddamn snake, eating its own tail.

“Ouroboros,” Andy said, peering at me over those spectacles he’d taken to wearing, a pencil behind his ear.

“Come again?”

“Ouroboros,” he said again, gesturing at the snake. His fingertips were silvery with graphite. He opened his mouth to continue, but Heywood started up a ruckus about the reams of _Good Housekeeping_ they kept sending even though none of us much liked the sound of roast beef in aspic. So I never got to hearing much more about this ouroboros.

I think about it a lot, though, when I’m looking at the ocean (which I do most days, and don’t suppose I’ll ever tire of), watching the tide creep towards our little cluster of cabins, and back again – about how the ocean’s older than I’ll ever be, or Andy, and how it keeps coming back, minute after minute, hour after hour, week after week, year after year, how the ocean doesn’t know it’s counting. The ocean flows into itself like a snake eating its own tail.

I’ve left marks everywhere I’ve been. Three different cells I had in Shawshank; I left my name on the walls of each one, and then when I got to the place Brooks died, I carved it there as well, next to his. But here, where I’ve been happiest – I could be here a hundred years, and never leave a trace. The tourists make sand forts. Moats and trenches, and the tide comes in, and the sand settles back into the echo of what it’s always been, like they were never there. I guess what Andy told me is true, though I find it more frightening than comforting, these days: the Pacific Ocean has no memory.

*

This is how I know time’s passed.

The couple who rented out the first cabin we built together, the first summer, after Andy sanded the floors and hung pretty curtains at the windows, came back a couple of years ago. Their kid must have been about four, old enough to sit quietly with me and watch me mend nets. I could tell Andy was touched, that they’d come back, and proud. Andy’s not a selfish man. He wants the whole world to get a piece of this paradise – that’s why he sent me off to find that black stone, so I could see it for myself.

The tourists wear different clothes, as time goes on. Me and Andy, we’ve swapped our prison denims for another sort of uniform, our arms bare and our shirts loose. The heat’s something else down here. Sometimes it feels like you could lie down on the sand and it’d scorch away everything bad inside you until all that’s left is the purest parts, the parts Shawshank couldn’t touch. We wear the same clothes every day, but the tourists dress in loose kaftans and flared jeans these days – clothes that would have made me laugh fit to burst back when I was a kid, before I committed my crime. When I first got out, I had to swallow all these changes in a heartbeat. Those fast cars. Girls with short skirts and tall hair. Now, I get to see the changes come more slowly. A good thing, for an old guy like me. I don’t take too well to change, these days. 

They’re building up the town. New apartment blocks. A strip of stores. Asphalt roads. It started a couple of years ago, bulldozers belching away, cranes in the distance like praying mantises. Andy’s not worried.

“Let them come,” he says. “We got a good thing here. Nice for families, y’know. Safe.” It’s not like we need the money. We have five cabins now, and Andy talks about setting up a sixth sometimes, but five is a nice number. Not too much to handle. Ines cycles across from Ixtapa twice a week to clean, and the American fathers with their sunburned necks and their soft middles try to flirt with her, and try to figure out the setup, how we wound up down here, a guy like Andy, and a guy like me.

*

Maine, we got snow. It came in through the bars in drifts and settled over us like a shroud before we woke. No such thing down here. Down here, we get storms.

We’ve been lucky, for the most part. They’re fickle, changeable beasts, when they come. They steam up the coast, hell bent on Baja California, wearing those pretty girls’ names like masks, and sometimes they fizzle out, and sometimes they’re like the wrath of God. Last year was bad, the worst I’ve known in the ten years we’ve been here. The season came on us, and we thought we’d got lucky, after Liza swung away to batter those poor bastards up north, but Madeline was on us a couple of days later.

We worked through the night, taping up the windows and hauling the boats up the beach. The rain began as we were still lashing down the shingles, our fingers so slippery we could hardly tie the knots. I felt like a little scrap of paper. A good gust would have torn me right off of that roof.

“Tell me again why we didn’t clear out?” I yelled across to the next cabin, where Andy was perched on the ridge, soaked to the skin.

“What?” he yelled back, scrubbing his hair out of his eyes.

“We shoulda cleared out!” I hollered, as the lightning started. It lit up the whole bay – the churning ocean, frothing and angry, and our tranquil little stretch of beach looked like there was electricity making it glow. The cluster of cabins – with their quaint porches and the handpainted signs outside – looked terribly small and fragile, huddled on the edge of the storm.

“We’ll be fine!” Andy yelled in the pause before the thunder. Another fork of lightning leapt across the bay, and I saw Andy’s teeth gleam, and his eyes shine – he was smiling, his thin shoulders braced against the squalls battering the cabins. I believed him, of course. There’s something about Andy – I didn’t see it, first time I saw him, that disbelieving, shell-shocked shuffle you see on all the new fish – but I got wise pretty damn quick; he makes you feel like everything’s going to be alright. Hell, it’s why I laid down a week’s pay to get me to Buxton; it’s why I rode that Greyhound for three days to get to the border, the years sloughing off my shoulders with each state line I left behind me.

I don’t know what it is that gets him through. Maybe it’s just pig obstinacy, like he’s just _decided_ he’s not going to let the world beat him. Anyone else, I’d say he’s just too dumb to realise he’s beat. Not Andy, though. Never known a mind like it. Beats me how he does it – looks at the deck, and how every card in it’s stacked the wrong way, and his first thought’s _no,_ and his second’s _this is what I’m gonna do._ If I didn’t know better I’d say he’s got ice in his veins, and maybe I’d have said that if you’d asked me back in ’47, maybe even in ’48, when he was still opening up. There’s no ice in him, though. He’s the furthest thing from cold. He loved that wife of his, and I guess he loves me too, and he loves this place, and what we’ve got going here. Maybe it’s flint. The stuff that can spark a fire. Whatever it is, it got him through one year, then the next, and the next, and through that narrow endless tunnel of shit, and it got him through Madeline, too.

We were up all night checking the battens – the rain on the tin roof of our cabin sounded like gunfire; there was no chance of sleep – and when morning finally came the bay was still and glassy again, and there were splinters of our poor smashed dinghy scattered up the dunes, and the shutters on the newest guest cabin were half-torn from their hinges, and Andy was standing with his hands on his hips, surveying the damage with this far-off half-smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, the same one he’d get in the yard sometimes, back when he was putting together the pieces of his redemption – though I didn’t know it at the time.

*

The time passes as smooth and as still as the ocean, mostly. Andy takes the boat out, most days. There’s not much fishing here – at least, not unless you know what you’re doing, and you got yourself the right gear, a couple of guys, and you’re willing to spend weeks out on the blue, tempting the fates. No, Andy keeps himself to day trips – the tourists like it, and Andy’s been here long enough that he knows the birds by the pitch of their flights, knows the best place to spot dolphins. I can just imagine him telling the passengers about them, steady and calm. That voice got him sent down – a jury doesn’t like a man who’s too much in control – but I bet they eat it up, when he’s telling them the facts, your honour, just the facts about the neotropic cormorant and the great-tailed grackle.

I stay on shore, for the most part. They say there are parts of the ocean so deep, we don’t know where they end, or what’s down there. Sometimes I think he’ll go out one day, and that’ll be the last I see of him. The same way I felt when he first told me about this place, the two of us, scuffing our boots in the dirt with our backs against the wall. I couldn’t have told you then, but turning it over in my mind after he broke out, after days and then weeks went by – before his postcard arrived – it sure felt like a goodbye. Try though I might I could never quite remember what his face looked like that day, in the shadow of the place; whether he had that old Andy smile on his face, or whether he was peering at me intently, willing me to remember, willing me to be brave.

I watch the _Rosalita_ until I can’t make out Andy at the wheel any more, and try to remember what his face looked like before he left my sight. We both look older now, but when I think of Andy, I think of how his face looked when they let him out of the hole, after the whole Mozart affair. His face had this serenity about it, like there was nothing and no one on earth who could hurt him. Somehow, when Andy’s away out on the ocean – or even at night when he’s asleep next to me and I’m lying there staring at the geckos scampering along the walls and trying not to dream – and I try to recall his face, I find I’m remembering him how he was years ago, gaunt and pale from weeks without sunshine, but young still, his eyes gleaming like he’d seen the face of God.

Mine’s been a life of people coming and going, without my say so, often without a warning or a chance for goodbye. Plenty of them I miss, and wonder what they’re doing now. Plenty more I’ve gladly let the Pacific Ocean wash away. Call me a sentimental old fool. Every time I see that boat of his heading for the horizon, I feel my chest get tight.

*

Not much time left, now, this much I know. Raúl was driving down to Acapulco, so I hitched a ride with him. We stopped at Papanoa and bought chilapas from a van and ate them looking at the ocean. We didn’t reach the city until gone two. I didn’t tell Andy I was going. Not much use until there was something to tell.

The doctor’s English was better than my Spanish – not that that’s saying much – so we muddled along all right. He had his diplomas on the wall, just like Warden Norton, and maybe he was selling me a pack of lies, too, just like Norton, except I couldn’t think of any reason he’d have to lie to me. He tried telling me to go to Tucson, that they’ve got machines there that’ll burn the stuff out of you from the inside, and then when I told him I’d no intention of seeing the other side of the border in this lifetime, he said, what about Mexico City, they just opened up a new cancer centre there, and I thought about all the time it’d take, the endless roads, how far away from the ocean, and from Andy. I told him I didn’t want none of that.

They laid me up in the infirmary at Shawshank in ’43 when diphtheria went through the camp. On the scale, it ranked a shade better than the hole, if only because the food was something more than bread and water, and because it was always light there, the white sun in the day and the scything searchlights in the night. You could see the time passing. I spent two weeks sweating through the sheets and coughing until my throat bled – damn near the worst two weeks of my life – and if this, now, is all the time I’ve got left to me, I’m damned if I’m pissing it away in a room I don’t recognise, in a city I’ve never been to.

The doc wrote me a script, and afterwards I walked along the beach, a popsicle I didn’t really want melting down my elbow, waiting for the kid to finish up his errands. They’ve put up these hotels all around the bay, hundreds of rooms, all with a sea view, all with these wide balconies. Nothing like our venture, which Andy calls “ramshackle” like he likes the feel of the word in his mouth – they’ve got swimming pools and restaurants and lounge singers and concierges. You can see the holiday makers in their fancy bathing suits, leaning on the rails, holding their cocktails, scanning the beach to work out where’s going to be their spot today. Puts me in mind of Byron Hadley, stalking the catwalk, the rifle butt knocking against his hip.

Raúl must have clocked I wasn’t much in the mood for talking, because we rode the whole way back to Zihuatanejo in silence. It was pitch dark when he dropped me at the foot of the dune, and I trudged up to the cabins with something to tell, and no words to tell it with.

*

It goes like this, most days. Don’t ask me how many. I didn’t even bother to start counting. All I know is, Andy saw me ploughing towards him, my shoes slipping on the sand and my tie whipping across my face, and jumped down from that boat, and my life began. What would I be counting for? Sometimes I think Andy’s winding time backwards, like each day he spends in Zihuatanejo will erase a day he spent inside. Building boats to wipe out what the Sisters did to him. Spending Warden Norton’s money like an open artery. The tides wipe out the sand forts. Me, I don’t worry about debts I’m owed or whether time’s finite or real or a flat circle coming round to bite us on the ass again. That’s the difference between him and me: Andy is an innocent man.

Some things change, some things don’t. I’m still the guy who can get you things. I got here with not a word of Spanish, beyond the profanities Reyes used to unleash whenever the machine plough packed up, which it did frequently, belching out acrid smoke that lingered over the fields for hours as we broke up the sod by hand. So I had a good portfolio of curse words that were no earthly use for asking the good people of Zihuatanejo and Ixtapa where to get lumber, or who could pour a concrete foundation hereabouts. I wasn’t going to let that stop me, though. You don’t follow Andy Dufresne halfway around the world on a wing and a prayer without getting to feeling like _no es possible, señor_ might just never work its way into your vocabulary. It took a while – that’s the other thing Andy’s taught me – but soon enough we had the lumber, and the concrete, and our hands were chafed and our shoulders rangy from working dawn til dusk, until we had something like a home fixed up on the edge of the world.

We put up this gazebo a year or so after I got to Zihuatanejo – I can just hear Heywood in my head, his brow furrowed, _now what in the heck is a gazebo –_ and we sit there most mornings, the floorboards bleached and soft beneath our bare feet. I gave away my own pair of respectable shoes, the ones I took with me to go inside, and were waiting for me, old-fashioned, when I got out, and which got me all the way down to Mexico, and have no use here.

We watch the ocean and play chess with the set Andy carved from stones Ines’ little girl scavenged. It was tough, finding rock blankets out here, but I’m a pro, and I presented them to Andy for the third anniversary of his great escape, wrapped around a new and gleaming rock hammer. Andy laughed softly and he kissed me and he told me he’d teach me chess if it was the last thing he did. Andy always did get his way, in the end: we play chess most evenings, looking out to the horizon, my foot resting against Andy’s ankle and the sun setting so it looks like the world’s on fire. Birds overhead and a cold beer in my hand. The rust on the bars, and grit in the food, and how the bedding was always somehow damp, even in summer – some days, now, it all seems so far off I can barely recall it. I hope the same is true for Andy.

We hunch over our pieces and shoot the breeze – sometimes we talk about Shawshank, and the guys we knew there, the ones we liked and the ones we didn’t – and the tide creeps in and maybe a breeze stirs the palms above us, and maybe Andy hauls himself back to the cabin to fetch us another beer from the ice box, and maybe lays a blanket over my shoulders as the night draws in. Beats me how anyone could get tired of it. The sea ablaze, and the sand cooling beneath our feet, and Andy, who got his wish after all – time, deciding to be kind; here we are, the two of us, willing time to last forever, after spending the best years of our lives willing time to pass.

**Author's Note:**

> Ponderosa, I wish you a very happy Yuletide, and hope you enjoy this.


End file.
